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Poster Session B: Wednesday, August 13, 1:00 – 4:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

How attention shapes simplified mental representations for planning

Jason da Silva Castanheira¹, Nicholas Shea², Stephen M. Fleming¹; ¹University College London, University of London, ²Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London

Presenter: Jason da Silva Castanheira

Naturalistic behaviour involves complex problems with multi-step actions, making searching for a solution challenging. Despite this hurdle, human planning is efficient—it frugally deploys limited cognitive resources—and flexible—adapting to novel problems. Recent work suggests that humans reason about difficult decisions by constructing simplified representations of their environment. However, how these simplified representations are constructed remains unknown. Here, we characterize how visual attention controls which aspects of a scene enter a task representation for use in planning. When task-relevant information is spatially confined to a visual hemifield, people can more easily construct simplified and useful task representations. Inspired by the ‘spotlight of attention’ analogy, we incorporate the effects of visuospatial attention into a novel computational model of constructing task representations for planning. Together, our work bridges computational models of decision-making and perception to better understand how individuals represent their environments in aid of planning.

Topic Area: Object Recognition & Visual Attention

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